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Thursday, May 31, 2007

Have you ever matched wits with a fundamentalist (of any religion)? Lived to tell about it?

I met my first one quite recently. We're both students at the same university and we even have some courses in common but I never really talked to her until one morning, we just started chatting on the bus. I was reading something for class and she whipped out her Bible.

When we got off to transfer routes, she started asking me questions about what I believe. At first, I skirted the issue and said Protestant, born and raised but then decided to be honest and identified as a polytheist. As we got on our way, she whipped out her Bible again and tried to make me read certain underlined passages aloud, on a crowded bus, and could not accept that I found that vastly inappropriate. So, she put it away and we got to the trick questions portion of the event. "How do pagans get saved?" "What do you think will happen when you die?" and all that Sneaky Deep crap. I was too surprised to be offended and I answered the best I could.

Eventually, we went our separate ways for different classes and that was the last time I talked to her. In hindsight, it was probably Someone's influence that kept me as surprised as I was. Looking back on it now, I'm really irritated with her and anything I say now is probably going to reinforce her negative view of non-Christians. Oh well, I have until September to get past the urge to taunt.